When i was a kid, I specialized in sport at a pretty young age. Once I began playing football, I loved the sport and often played multiple seasons per year (summer and fall). Even though I ended up playing 16 seasons in my career, one aspect of my game wasn’t properly developed until near the end of my career - that was my speed.
For all the seasons I played, and drills I ran as a football player, I was never taught to run faster. It wasn’t until I reached the University level that our team employed a speed coach (aka track coach). Until that point, if I had gotten faster, it could only be attributed to general growth and development, as I also didn’t begin training consistently until university as well. After we began using this coach as a team, I spent two years training with him Continue Reading

When it comes to being a strength coach, the training (in person) is really only one aspect of the job. There are countless tasks and responsibilities that creep into your job profile. The difficult thing is staying sharp with all of these duties. One of the areas I've seen coaches struggle is in the software side. Between program design, data collection/analysis and visualizations, there's a lot to stay on top of. We're constantly reading the latest research, training/coaching theory and even leadership books, but learning the software side of things seems to always take a backseat (like web development for me). For that reason, I'm sharing a cool resource for software tools! Strength Coach Tutorials A good friend of mine, and strength coach, Dave Scott-McDowell has been creating content Continue Reading

In most sports, if you don't have speed, you're at a serious disadvantage. Sure you can make up for it with skill in some cases, but you're making it really hard for yourself.
I haven't always put so much emphasis on speed training, but I do now.
*The picture above is from one of my athletes, Pat Norton. Pat is extremely dedicated and has goals to make the national team for bobsleigh.
Support Pat by checking out his site: Versus Everything
DISCOVERING SPEED
Having never run track in high school, it wasn't until playing at the University level that I received any technical speed training. Luckily, our team employed a track coach to teach fundamentals to our team in the off season. Although that set up didn't exactly lend itself to great performance (limited sessions Continue Reading

Don't just lift weights. Get FASTER.
There are two things I'm very passionate about in coaching: Speed Training and Performance Enhancement.
I know many people will say the same things, but I don't think they really act on it.
If you coach field sport athletes and you don't help them get faster, you're doing them a disservice. For some strange reason, strength coaches will track weights but will only time sprints a couple times a year, usually at camp. This is unacceptable.
I will write a longer post on this topic, but if you aren't tracking metrics, then you don't know if your performance has improved. This can go for anything, but for some reason, team sports lack the guidance to use this for speed training.
If you test 40s at training camp and Continue Reading

​My job as a strength coach is to help people get better. At the end of the day, it’s as simple as that. Training plyometrics is essential to that, but there's an educational hurdle that needs to be overcome.
I create a plan and execute that plan for each individual athlete. In order for this to be successful, the athlete and strength coach need to be on the same page. I need to have an understanding of the athletes needs and current abilities and the athlete needs to trust me and buy into the program. For elite or advanced athletes, the second part is often easier if the athlete has an understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish with my program and how that affects them.
Once in a while, and this is more common with beginners because they have little understanding of the physical Continue Reading